1. Field of Invention
This invention is directed toward combined dispensing of related but dissimilar items, more specifically to an improved system for the combined dispensing of fluid and sheet products.
The invention is also directed toward a method for dispensing fluids in combination with sheet products.
2. Description of Prior Art
Fluid and sheet products are frequently intentionally combined in use across a broad range of applications, from liquid cleansers and paper towels to cosmetic liquids and pads. Managing these combinations of separate items is usually somewhat involved and can be inconvenient.
A good example of such inconvenience can be found in the difficulties surrounding using a spray cleaner in combination with a roll of paper towels. Spray cleaners are usually used in combination with paper towels, typically on a roll. But without a third hand, it becomes difficult to juggle the roll of towels, the sprayer, and the wad of towels used to wipe with. So in the process of cleaning, consumers usually end up constantly picking up and putting down the bulkiest item, the towels. In the process, the towels often get wet or dirty (after all, it is usually wet or dirty where one is cleaning), knocked over, or squashed, or the roll can roll away or become unraveled, wasting towels or forcing consumers to sloppily re-roll them, etc. Additionally, it can be frustrating to find both sprayer and towels when they are needed, since although they are frequently used together, they are not typically stored together. This is due not only to the large size and considerable bulk of the roll of towels, but also to the fact that the towels are just as susceptible to unwinding and getting wet or dirty in storage as they are in use.
So it is evident from the above example that it would be desirable to provide means which would not only allow the user to find both fluid and sheets readily at hand when needed, but would also: allow the user to dispense both freely while still having a free hand to use the dispensed items; prevent the towels from unraveling; protect them from getting wet or dirty; and store them safely and space-efficiently.
Many further examples of the difficulty of managing separate fluid and sheets exist, but the above example should be sufficient to illustrate the overall nature of such problems.
Consequently, many developments have been attempted with the goal of more conveniently combining fluids and sheet products.
Three primary directions have resulted:
The first direction has been to pre-combine fluid and sheets in non-dispensing single compartment package, and numerous pre-moistened wipes and the like of such nature have been developed. However, this overall approach has a number of major inherent disadvantages, including: the consumer loses the ability to control the amount of fluid applied to the sheet; pre-moistened sheets are not wet enough to thoroughly saturate a surface; they are not dry enough to wipe surfaces dry; the fluid and sheet material may not react well together over time and may so become degraded; and it is difficult to retain moisture in the sheets and expensive to provide the packaging to do so.
The second direction has been to combine fluid packages and sheet packages in joined or multi-compartment packages in which one or both compartments are non-dispensing. While this approach allows users to readily find and transport necessary items together from location to location, such packages must be disassembled into separate parts before use, in which case the user ends up with the typical set of previously described problems associated with the manipulation and use of separate sheet product and fluid product items.
The third direction has been to create devices which allow for simultaneous dispensing of both products without requiring any disassembly, essentially unified dispensers rather than combined packages. Such unified dispensers are usually either fixed, portable, or mobile. Fixed dispensers are intended for constant use in a single location only (such as U.S. Pat. No. 1,582,645, a xe2x80x9cCombination Liquid Soap Dispenser and Towel Rack,xe2x80x9d issued to W. F. Findley in 1926), while portable dispensers may be moved occasionally from location to location (such as the free-standing embodiment of U.S. Pat. No. 3,865,271, a xe2x80x9cDispenser and Liquid Applicator for Toilet Paper, Paper Towels, and the Likexe2x80x9d to Gold in 1975), and mobile dispensers are intended for constant, uninterrupted movement both from location to location and within a location. Since the present invention relates primarily to the mobile variety of dispensers, further discussion here will focus substantially on prior art which has wholly or partly attempted to address the issue of mobility. Since I will be showing that none of these devices are truly mobile, I will refer to them as semi-mobile systems.
Many examples of semi-mobile combined fluid and sheet dispensers exist in the prior art, dating back many years; yet none have achieved widespread and lasting commercial success. The prior art clearly demonstrates a long-felt need, but configurations provided have all been cumbersome, inconvenient, or incomplete. A further review of the most pertinent prior art should serve to underscore this point:
An early phase of development in the prior art is described by a series of U.S. Patents: U.S. Pat. No. 603,316, to J. W. Bush in 1898, U.S. Pat. No. 1,255,772 to Miller in 1918, U.S. Pat. No. 1,523,297 to Savery in 1925, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,516,676 to Cournoyer in 1985. All describe essentially the same overall configuration: a cylindrical sheet roll dispenser with a narrow slit out of which to dispense the towels; and a second and smaller cylindrical dispenser for fluid located entirely within the core of the sheet roll. At the point of fluid dispensing, Bush describes a dipping wand, Miller a plain threaded cap, Savery a nozzle, and Cournoyer a small pump. The above combined dispensers all had many inherent disadvantages: they required consumers to thread towels through a very narrow slot in a very confined space; they provided only limited fluid reservoirs given the small size of the towel roll core; they provide inadequate gripping means; and they were all only semi-mobile. Bush""s, Miller""s and Savery""s devices would require constant picking up and putting down, because they all require two-handed operation and leave no hand free for using dispensed product or holding items to be cleaned. Coumoyer""s device would be exceedingly awkward to use in mid-air and would likely need to be first put down on a surface before it could be properly operated. Thus, in addition to numerous other problems, none of these devices were truly mobile.
A further phase of development in the prior art seems to address the issue of limited fluid space provided in the towel roll core in earlier devices. U.S. Pat. No. 4,436,224 to McInerny in 1984, U.S. Pat. No. 5,671,872 to Daniels, Jr., in 1997 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,819,989 to Saraceni in 1998, all illustrate the same new configuration: rather than confining the fluid reservoir to the space within the towel roll, they expand the reservoir outside the towel roll and to the opposite end away from their fluid dispensing outlet. These devices are essentially spray or pump bottles with long necks going through paper towel rolls. This overall configuration has many inherent disadvantages: bottles with such long necks and such wide bases are difficult and exceedingly expensive to mold (in fact, it is often not reasonably possible to mold such packages in plastics which require stretch-blow molding, such as the most typical kinds of very clear plastic used in packaging today); long-necked, wide-based bottles are also exceedingly difficult to empty in use, because the diptubes, once down the long neck, cannot draw from the wide base when the package is partially emptied and angled in use (spray packages are in fact most often angled in use, so this is a real issue); long-necked, wide-based bottles are also difficult for manufacturers to fill on the packing line because fluid fills the base slowly and then suddently shoots up when it reaches the neck, creating the potential for spills; long-necked, wide-based bottles are further hard to fill on manufacturer""s packing lines because bottles require a certain amount of empty headspace by volume which appears exaggerated in a long neck and is objectionable to consumers who think they""re being shorted; bottles which are too tall and unstable (in this case, primarily the Daniels, Jr. bottle) can""t be filled on a manufacturing line without the use of special and costly xe2x80x9cpuckxe2x80x9d systems to allow the bottles to stand vertically upright for filling; since the towel rolls must slide down over these thin necks, it is no longer possible to have an ergonomically superior angled xe2x80x9cpistol gripxe2x80x9d shaped neck inexpensively molded into the bottle, otherwise the current norm for trigger sprayer bottles; the towels are now exposed and unprotected, not only to contamination by the surrounding environment, but by the system itself, since the towels are directly under the dispenser nozzle, where they will likely be spoiled by drips; the devices are large, ungainly and awkward to handle (the McInerny device provides no gripping means and is thus, like the Cournoyer device above, essentially only suitable for countertop use, while the Daniels and Saraceni patents both suffer from a low center of gravity far from the hand, which would make them unusually difficult to rotate and maneuver in use, even granted their huge size); and none of these systems allow for true mobile use. The Mclnerny device was probably never intended for true mobile use, given the suitability for countertop use only noted above. And neither the Saraceni nor the Daniels device provided any means for towel stopping when tearing. Which meant the user of either of these devices would have had to simply try to rip towels off, one-handed, as fast as possible, hoping they could break a towel free before the whole roll unraveled. Of course this is impractical and must frequently if not usually have failed. Therefore, the users themselves would have had to provide the braking, giving up their grip on the trigger sprayer and braking the roll with one hand to pull a towel free with the other. This would leave one with a dispensed towel in one hand and the body of the towels in the other. Some juggling would then have to be done and something likely put down and picked up again to regain a grip on the trigger sprayer, thereby canceling out the advantages of this purportedly mobile system. Thus, in addition to numerous other problems, none of these devices were truly mobile.
Additionally, the broadest possible commercial application for such combined dispensing devices is in the arena of disposable packaged goods, where they would be sold next to their counterparts, the individually packaged products they combine, e.g., alongside paper towels in the supermarket paper towel aisle or alongside spray cleaners in the cleaner aisle. However, none of the prior art specifically mentioned above would be suitable for such sale, because all the devices have one or more of the following problems: too expensive to be disposable and sold alongside disposable; too big or bulky to fit on standard supermarket shelves; no protected area for a label; too difficult or expensive to package for sale; too unattractive to be appealing to consumers; not obvious enough for shoppers to quickly understand.
Finally, all instances of the prior art specifically mentioned above dispense paper towel rolls, while none seek to novelly improve the manner in which individual towels are dispensed. The present invention, however, will utilize my co-pending patent for reliable and inexpensive pop-up dispensing from a continuous, perforated web, which will eliminate all the difficulty associated with standard dispensing from a roll, such as off-perforation tearing, overdispensing, unraveling, or the need to use two hands, and will instead provide all the ease-of-use and one-handed benefits inherent to pop-up dispensing systems.
A combined dispensing system comprising a fluid dispenser and a pop-up sheet dispenser which snap together to trap and store sheets ready for pop-out dispensing. The system allows for simultaneous one-handed dispensing of either dispenser, and lets a user clean uninterrupted while walking around and without having to stop to set anything down. The sheets are double-folded, so they take up less space and provide for a smaller system, and held in a container and protected from getting wet, dirty, or deformed. The system is small, convenient, inexpensive and easy to use or store.
Further, it may readily be adapted to the combined dispensing of other related fluids and towels, such as cosmetics and cosmetic pads.
Accordingly, several objects and advantages of my invention are to provide a combined fluid and sheet material dispensing system which:
is always immediately ready for use without requiring any assembly or disassembly (other than refilling);
provides easy refilling and rethreading of sheet material;
protects sheet products from dirt, moisture and other contaminants, both in use and in storage;
protects sheet products from being crushed, wrinkled, or otherwise physically malformed, both in use and in storage;
reduces bulk of paper towels while still allowing dispensing of full-size material;
reduces overall bulk of dispenser; thus making it more convenient to hold, carry or store;
has an ample fluid reservoir commensurate to the quantity of sheet material being dispensed;
can be stored in environments normally damaging to sheet materials;
can readily access and dispense nearly 100% of its fluid reservoir at nearly any common angle of use;
provides a package with a center of gravity higher and closer to the hand aiding in package rotation and maneuvering in use;
provides a package of conveniently small size for use;
permits inexpensively molding a superior ergonomic grip into the bottle;
is so inexpensive to manufacture that it can be considered disposable;
can be readily stretch-blow molded in crystal clear plastic;
can be readily filled on the manufacturer""s packing line without requiring a puck system;
can be readily filled on the manufacturer""s line without the appearance of objectionable underfill;
is small enough to fit on standard supermarket shelves;
is suitable for sale without any additional packaging other than a label;
provides a protected area for a label;
is attractive enough to be appealing to consumers;
and is obvious enough to be readily understood by consumers.
Further objects and advantages of my invention are to provide a combined fluid and sheet material dispensing system which:
provides control over sheet products such that they do not accidentally self-dispense, both in use and in storage;
provides means for a single sheet to be dispensed without requiring a second hand to restrain the remainder of undispensed sheets;
allows the user a free hand to use dispensed products;
does not in any part need to be set down in use or during use of any subsequent products dispensed from it;
eliminates negatives of typical roll-dispensing systems, such as off-perforation tearing, overdispensing, unraveling, or the necessity of two handed dispensing;
allows for simple, pop-up dispensing of sheet materials; and
provides truly one-handed mobile operation, allowing constant, uninterrupted use both from location to location and within a location.
Further objects and advantages of my invention will become apparent from a consideration of the drawings and ensuing description.